I am pulling out my hair this morning! I don't have much experience with charts in Access, typically just stick with Excel for charts. But the need has arisen for some dynamic charts in Access.

I have a field that I am using as the x-axis. It is a text field that contains the month and year for issues in the format MMM-YY. If I leave the formatting for the x-axis as General Access recognizes the field as a date but not month-year. It thinks the field is month-day. So it automatically assumes the year is 2012 and displays every month as MM/DD/YYYY where DD is actually the year portion of the field and YYYY is 2012. If I change the formatting to Text Access assumes again that my MMM-YY is actually MMM-DD and converts it to MM/DD/YYYY and displays it as a date serial. If I change the formatting to Custom and select mmm-yy it again assumes my YY in the field is actually DD and displays everything as MMM-12 regardless of the actual year.

I then attempted to just convert my MMM-YY field to MM/DD/YYYY in the record source query and using 01 for DD since I don't really have the actual day for the issue, just month and year. And I still can't get the chart to display what I actually want.

Please help! What do I need to do to get the chart to actually display MMM-YY exactly how I have it in the field?

On a whim I decided that since Access can't seem to understand that I want my text field to be treated as text and not a date I decided to choose Custom format and then enter MMM-DD. Since Access is assuming that my year is actually a day this worked! So I solved this on my own. But I don't like the solution since it's not a true solution to the problem, just a work around. So if anyone has any other ideas please let me know.